Higher integration of a semiconductor element and enhanced processing ability of an arithmetic element have led to reduction in size and weight of electronic devices and availability of portable highly functional electronic devices. Further, sufficient information distribution infrastructure in a society, as well as increased capacity of a memory element, has enabled users to deal with a large amount of information with portable electronic devices even when the users are outside the house. In particular, the degree of importance of display devices that visually transmit information to users has been increasing with the development of electronic devices.
However, it is desirable that portable electronic devices continuously operate for a long time even when it is difficult to receive power from a lamp line. An increase in capacity of a battery and a reduction in power consumption are strongly demanded in order to increase the operation time of the portable electronic devices.
Further, a reduction in power consumption of electronic devices is an urgent task also from the viewpoint of current energy issues. A technique for suppressing power consumption of television devices which have been increasing in size, as well as portable electronic devices, has been demanded.
In a conventional display device, writing operations of the same image data are performed at regular intervals even in the case where image data in successive periods are the same. In order to suppress power consumption of such a display device, for example, a technique has been reported in which a break period which is longer than a scanning period is set as a non-scanning period every time after image data is written by scanning a screen in the case of displaying a still image (e.g., see Patent Document 1 and Non-Patent Document 1).    [Patent Document 1] U.S. Pat. No. 7,321,353    [Non-Patent Document 1] K. Tsuda et al., IDW′ 02, Proc., pp. 295-298